Log24

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Deutsche Ordnung

The title is from a phrase spoken, notably, by Yul Brynner
to Christopher Plummer in the 1966 film “Triple Cross.”

Related structures —

Greg Egan’s animated image of the Klein quartic —

For a smaller tetrahedral arrangement, within the Steiner quadruple
system of order 8 modeled by the eightfold cube, see a book chapter
by Michael Huber of Tübingen

Steiner quadruple system in eightfold cube

For further details, see the June 29 post Triangles in the Eightfold Cube.

See also, from an April 2013 philosophical conference:

Abstract for a talk at the City University of New York:

The Experience of Meaning
Jan Zwicky, University of Victoria
09:00-09:40 Friday, April 5, 2013

Once the question of truth is settled, and often prior to it, what we value in a mathematical proof or conjecture is what we value in a work of lyric art: potency of meaning. An absence of clutter is a feature of such artifacts: they possess a resonant clarity that allows their meaning to break on our inner eye like light. But this absence of clutter is not tantamount to ‘being simple’: consider Eliot’s Four Quartets  or Mozart’s late symphonies. Some truths are complex, and they are simplified  at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be  truths. Nonetheless, it’s often possible to express a complex truth in a way that precipitates a powerful experience of meaning. It is that experience we seek — not simplicity per se , but the flash of insight, the sense we’ve seen into the heart of things. I’ll first try to say something about what is involved in such recognitions; and then something about why an absence of clutter matters to them.

For the talk itself, see a YouTube video.

The conference talks also appear in a book.

The book begins with an epigraph by Hilbert

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress